A Dallas County jury on Friday found a man guilty of capital murder, rejecting his claims that he didn’t know right from wrong when he killed his girlfriend and her daughter.

The punishment phase of Tyrone Cade’s trial will begin Monday as prosecutors ask jurors to send him to death row for the brutal stabbing deaths of 37-year-old Mischell Fuller and 18-year-old Desaree Hoskins in March 2011 at their Irving home.

After the presiding juror read the verdict, Cade sat in his chair, slumped to the left with a hand over his face – a common position throughout the trial. When he stood as jurors filed out of the courtroom, he closed his eyes. The family of Fuller and Hoskins left without commenting.

Defense attorneys Lalon “Clipper” Peale, Richard Franklin and John Tatum tried to convince jurors that Cade, 39, was not guilty by reason of insanity – meaning a mental disease or defect prevented him from knowing right from wrong.

They said physical and sexual abuse as a child, chronic back pain, depression, unemployment, suspicions that Fuller cheated on him and Fuller trying to end their relationship culminated in a mental break that led to the murders.

“He snapped. He went off the chain,” Peale told jurors in closing arguments. “They build up and build up.”

But prosecutors Heath Harris, Jason Hermus and Rachael Jones told jurors that killing the women was an evil act and that Cade knew exactly what he was doing when he stabbed Fuller and then Hoskins.

“The insanity defense – are you kidding me?” Harris said to jurors, telling them that the stabbings of the women and rape of Fuller was about “dominance,” “control,” “punishing” and “retribution.”

Tyrone Cade

A doctor who examined Cade for prosecutors found that he was not insane at the time of the murders, according to testimony. Defense experts who reviewed records and literature testified that it was possible Cade did not know right from wrong. But because they did not interview Cade, they could not offer a definitive opinion.

Since Cade’s arrest, he has been treated for minor depression, according to testimony. But there was no prior indication of a history of mental illness, although his father suffers from schizophrenia and a bipolar disorder.

Cade admitted to police that he stabbed the women after secretly recording Fuller having a provocative Skype conversation with her ex-husband.

Cade told police in a video recorded interview that he tried to question Fuller at knife point at their Irving home about the conversation. But he said he stabbed her because she would not be silent. Cade said he stabbed Hoskins when she ran into the room after hearing her mother’s screams.

Cade was previously convicted of sexual assault in Collin County in 2002.

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